Thanks for your detailed respone. Please send me the fonts. Type 1 is my
preference but Truetype is ok. Even better
consider adding them to the wiki. Once I have worked out how to get decent
looking boxs I add a page to the J Wiki.
I'ts amazing that with nearly thrity years of dealing with this that this is
still such a pain in the posterior. Eric was
right to give up on box characters for J.
john baker
On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:09 PM, Joey K Tuttle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> John,
>
> One of the reasons I dislike box drawing characters is the large number of
> hours I spent tweaking them for the book "Computer Architecture Concepts and
> Evolution" by Gerrit Blaauw and Frederick Brooks. The book was crafted by
> David Lines, a graduate student of Fred's using TeX and a font that provided
> them.
>
> Actually, Fred wanted non-italic characters, so they substituted in Courier
> glyphs that ended up in the book. The endless arguments over italic, slanted
> (and the slant angle) and especially the adaption of lowercase italic
> "American Typewriter Light" (the font the original APL type element borrowed
> from) were almost as tedious as the line drawing stuff.
>
> The changes from the IPSA SAX font that I did for Fred Brooks were minor
> and involved trying to get the boxes to join smoothly in the sizes being
> used in the book - an endless pursuit... (but then, you did say "those
> irritating box characters") However, I'm curious, what was missing from the
> SAX font? It originally had a complete set. Did Bob move them around or did
> some go missing?
> In the original font, the box characters were below space (this was done
> because codepoints above 127 were consumed by APL and "underbar" alphabetic
> characters making 11 contiguous positions unavailable).
>
> The SAX font glyphs started in codepoint 15 with the IPSA logo, followed by
> 11 box drawing characters in an order that is perhaps different than the DOS
> order, then TM, CircleC, CircleR, open star, and codepoint 31 was my
> initials (JKT) in a logo... Some of these were in the nature of watermarks.
>
> In addition to the APL fonts, I have one that was put together for J (the
> early years) using Courier Roman for alphabetics and special characters
> (@#$% etc.). In that font, the box characters are immediately above 128 and
> the rest of the upper half of font is blank.
>
> One interesting variation on all this was the font used in the IBM Systems
> Journal, APL 25th Anniversary Edition. Italics were vetoed and the slant
> angle was reduced (I argued against changing from 14 degrees to 7 degrees,
> but gave in since IBM was paying me in lieu of giving me credit in the
> colophon - an amusing thing in itself...) Later, the feedback was that the
> font really should have been more slanted... Perhaps the most curious thing
> about that font is that it is the only PostScript font that I have ever
> encountered that was in EBCDIC (not ASCII) order... I talked to the printing
> company about it and they said they didn't argue with IBM - and just please
> provide it that way and they would deal with it....
>
> One of the suggestions in this thread was to use ISO characters, and for
> some things that is OK. But IMHO, APL rendered in such a font always reminds
> me of a ransom note...
>
> I have various versions of these fonts if they are of any interest/use to
> you.
>
> - joey
>
>
>
> At 12:09 -0700 2008/06/04, John Baker wrote:
>
>> I want to typeset the J graphic box characters in LaTeX2e - particularly
>> the
>> pdftek MikTeK version - using the \usepackage{lstlistings}
>> package.
>>
>> For this to work I need a typewriter family virtual TeX font that
>> combines
>> Ghostscript Adobe Courier with the box
>> characters found in something like TrueType Lucida Console (Type 1 would
>> be
>> easier). The resulting virtual font has
>> to be properly defined and mapped for LaTeX2e. I've poked around J and
>> CTAN
>> and the only thing I've come up with is
>> Bob Berneky's adaption of a Type 1 APL sax font which doesn't have a
>> complete set of box characters.
>>
>> I'm enough of a TeXnician to do this but if I someone else has a good
>> solution LaTeX2e typesetting of box characters please chime in.
>>
>> John Baker
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
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